Give Joe Gorga some credit.
He didn’t beat around a single bush on Tuesday night.
He didn’t mince a single word.
On the latest episode of The Real Housewives of New Jersey, Teresa Giudice’s brother came right out and confronted Teresa Giudice’s’s fiance, asking Luis Ruelas about some of the troubling rumors floating around the Internet about him.
“So what’s up with the past?” Gorga asked Ruelas point blank during a cast gathering in Nashville.
Responded Ruelas, who proposed to Teresa last fall:
“I got divorced when I was 35 and I was pretty confused. And then I went on to have a couple toxic relationships [with] desperate, thirsty, low-life exes.”
Fair enough, perhaps. But that’s obviously not an excuse for any sort of abuse.
“You could’ve been in a toxic relationship, but [the stories] are constantly coming” Gorga countered on air. “There’s obviously some truth to those stories. Some of them, right?”
Ruelas then confessed that he hasn’t always been “this crown of a man” and “made [his] own mistakes” in previous relationships.
“I take ownership of that,” Ruelas said, although he emphasized that he “wasn’t abusive,” which is a pretty important point here.
All he’s been through with these women, though? All the mistakes he’d made and challenges he’s faced? It’s all led him here, Luis said, into the arms of his soulmate.
“The amount of sleepless nights I’ve had, you know, trying to manifest the right woman in my life, I just want to ensure you that I will always be there for her, I won’t let her down,” Ruelas told Gorga of Giudice, adding of the polarizing Bravo personality:
“I will love her every second of the day because she deserves that.”
Gorga took this statement as Ruelas asking him for permission to marry his sister, a gesture he very much seemed to appreciate.
“Listen, if you’re asking me for her hand, absolutely,” he told Luis. “Thank you.”
In a confessional, Gorga explained why he gave Ruelas his blessing — despite the negative press that has been following him around for months now.
“Yes, Louie’s admitting that he wasn’t perfect. But what he is doing in the present, that’s what’’s important,” Joe said into the camera.
“And because my father’s not here, I appreciate Louie showing me the respect [to ask].
“He understands what family’s all about, so I support their marriage.”
Ruelas has faced claims that he is “sex-obsessed,” was abusive in past relationships and has dealt legal troubles over allegedly improper business practices.
Teresa has defended him throughout, getting into frequent fights with her co-stars this season in response.
She’s about to get into it with her own brother, too, as evidenced in the Real Housewives of New Jersey reunion trailer below.
“I wish you would f-cking tell Margaret to shut the f-ck up,” Teresa screams at Joe, blasting her sibling for not previously coming to Ruelas’ defense amid Margaret Josephs and her spouse talking trash about Luis on earlier episodes.
“This f-cker and his wife talking about my f-ckin boyfriend.”
“You should be f-cking slapping [Margaret’s husband] upside of his f-cking head,” she adds, which prompts Joe to walk out of the room and later declare:
I quit.
